104 
to visit Canada and in the very theatre of 
colonizing activity secure a first-hand..and 
intimate impression of its more salient 
features. In due time he found him- 
self set down, in the cool, still night of 
Northern latitudes, on the steamboat pier at 
New Liskeard, on Lake Temiskaming. 
Here is the essence of the frontier, a 
rough and unwashed community set upon 
the verge of a vast country of infinite possibil- 
RECREATION 
lay before me—and though dress and out- 
ward appearance were rough and unkempt 
in all alike, facial characters differentiated 
the various callings of these men as clearly 
as did their conversation. Kersey-coated, 
slouch-hatted, belarriganed, shaggy of hair 
and beard they all were, moving in little 
knots of three and four to and from the wet 
and shiny magnet where’ the glassesslid back 
and forth while the blue haze of ‘‘ Mac- 

RAPIDS ON THE BLANCHE 
ities, vitalized through commerce and the 
promise of the future with a hustling, 
optimistic cosmos of fifteen hundred souls. 
Ten years ago a solitary log cabin marked 
the spot, and six years later there were 
less than two hundred inhabitants; to-day 
a railroad enters the “‘back yard” of the 
town,: two lines of steamers dock in the 
shallow bay it faces, churches and. hotels 
have been built, a newspaper issues a 
weekly edition and -a Chinese laundry 
flaunts its flaming sign before the visitor. 
In a frontier settlement the place to 
study types is before the inevitable hotel 
‘“‘bar,”’ and, as New Liskeard was no ex- 
ception: to the rule, I braved the reek and 
heavy exhalations of the ‘‘sample room”’ to 
mingle with the throng. If any index were 
needed to summarize the industries that 
evolve from the conquest of new territory it 
Donald’s Plug” eddied around them. 
Lumbermen, trappers, prospectors, sur- 
veyors, construction hands from the railroad 
and settlers formed the different groups— 
but it was plain the settlers had the call. 
This congress, as it were, of frontier 
workers, sordid and low as its local sur- 
roundings may- perhaps appear, was not 
without its picturesque quality, its humor 
and its type value as a phase of frontier life. 
There was no drunkenness and no dis- 
order—rough and primitive as it was it 
still had the savor and the spirit of a mart 
of public opinion, the natural resort of rough 
and primitive men in council. 
Though interest in this scene brought me 
late to bed I.was up betimes and went 
groping through the morning mist to board 
the little ‘“‘Geisha.’”’? A few miles of rough 
water brought us to where the Blanche, in 
